Hello Pretty's Birthday!
We had a birthday in December! We celebrated our public launch in the best way possible - with cake and nice people. (that's all you really want from life you know?) In terms of birthdays, it can get pretty complicated. There's the birth of the idea, the birth of the team, the birth of site itself (our private beta launch), and then the day we opened our metaphorical doors to the general public with our out of beta launch. So all in all, this tiny baby company has been around for three years, and is not such a baby anymore. (I feel like company years should actually work like dog years. We did a lot of learning during that time!)
Let me tell you, we're so proud of this cool thing we've built. People told us we were crazy, told us we were wrong, predicted that we were doomed to fail - and there we were, three years down the line, shoving cake in our faces.
Our success is reliant on the success of our sellers - the more we help South African small busineses thrive, the more we thrive. As Sam has said on occassion, we're like a pyramid scheme, but awesome!
There's no way to fully describe how satisfying it is to be able to help entrepreneurs grow - I wake up every morning feeling filled with purpose, and am incredibly grateful for that (Although it turns out that skipping around town delivering cupcakes is pretty satisfying too!)
Thank you all for your amazing and overwhelming support - to the buyers, the sellers, the bloggers, the magazines, the long suffering friends - we wouldn't be here without you all. We well and truly love each and every one of you for enabling us to do what we love.
Now I need to go before I get downright emotional. Hearts and puppies and kittens and stuff.
Posted by Lee on 27 Jan 2015
Reading, writing, sketching, painting, making. Hopeful designer. Recent Capetonian, Durbanite at heart. Head of Strategy and Social at Hello Pretty.